Daniel Greenfield: reasons for optimism

 

Daniel Greenfield at FrontPageMag has real reasons for optimism.  Here’s an extract:

. . . Few people across the country are feeling optimistic about 2023. The old jokes about 2021 and 2022 have long since worn thin. Inflation is draining incomes, insecurity is growing and the lack of confidence in a better future has hit numbers that we may have never seen before among Americans in modern times.

Times are hard.

But hope paradoxically comes from hard times. Comfort breeds complacency. The seeds of the tragedy we’re living through were sown when most people decided that they could take a vacation from history, from thinking about what their leaders were doing, what was being taught in their schools, and from politics.

No answer was ever going to emerge from the false hopes of a comfortable society.

The pain that’s being experienced is something that no one should welcome, but it will get worse. And the only hope will come from that. As we’ve seen in the midterms, people are worried, angry and afraid. But the lessons still haven’t been learned. Life can get worse than the price of staples going up by the double digits.

If things go on at this rate, it will. And economics are the least of it.

The hard times we’re living through are nothing compared to what some previous generations experienced. And while I hope that things won’t have to get worse, wake-up calls are painful miserable things.

Mr Greenfield concludes:

We are living through history. And we’re not passive actors in it. We can seize the moment. We can fight for change. The guard rails are off. The system is coming apart. But we’re not doomed to be passive actors in it. Unlike so much of the last generation, what we do can actually make a difference if we make the right choices.

2023 is ours to win or lose.

It’s a very good read.  Click here.

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Bidenomics

A F Branco cartoon seen at Flopping Aces:

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Neil Oliver on the New Year

 

Here’s part of Neil Oliver’s weekend monologue to ring in the New Year:

In a few hours, we welcome 2023, but as far as our leaders and their lackeys are concerned it might as well be Groundhog Day.

I look at the headlines on this last day of 2022 and what do I see? Covid, Ukraine and Climate Change. Folks nuttier than anything found in a selection box are talking about bringing back face masks. God help us. Let’s remind everyone for the umpteenth time that Covid is now no more dangerous to most than the common cold. But still, the talk is of the pandemic, same old, same old.

. . .

I honestly feel the relentless push to keep us down, with fear of pestilence, fear of war, fear of the ending of the world, is the equivalent of a sustained beating designed, once and for all, to knock the last of the spirit out of us so that finally we shut up and do as we’re told.

But here’s the thing: that spirit is not vanquished. Instead, and on the contrary, in the hearts and minds of enough of us, that spirit has been ignited into flame.

. . .

The more each of us speaks to out in the world, the better. The more we share, the more reassurance we provide one another, and the stronger we are. That’s where the hope lies, and the promise of brighter days sooner or later.

. . .

The Hobbit Frodo Baggins feels all but overwhelmed by the enormity of the task ahead of him and tells the wizard Gandalf,

“I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

“So do I,” replies Gandalf. “And so do all who live to see such times. But it is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Happy New Year, to all dear friends and fellow travelers.

Read the rest of the transcript here.

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Happy New Year!

 

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Why pay cash?

As global digital currency looms ominously in our future, here’s a meme I saw the other day at Bookworm Room that shows one reason that cash is better than digital (or any credit card):

Click to embiggen or go to the link above and scroll down.

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Climate change prison

 

Here’s Andrea Widburg on the most recent climate change insanity:

. . . in accordance with UN and WEF climate recommendations, the city of Oxford (home to the famed university) approved plans mandating that citizens may not drive more than 15 minutes distance from their homes without permission. It’s called the “15 Minute City” and is intended to reduce auto emissions. Mostly, though, it will reduce liberty, which is what climate change madness has always been about.

. . .

Making choices based on lifestyle preferences is a perfectly sound, market-based way to go through life.

But the marketplace is not what globalists want. They want control. Certainly, that’s the case in and around Oxford, England. Word is trickling into America that both the leftist Oxfordshire County Council and the Oxford City Council have plans. Big plans.

. . .

And the conclusion:

. . . Socialism is totalitarianism, which exists under many names (theocracy, military junta, fascism, communism) but, no matter the name, the goal is always the same: Completely control a population for the benefit of a small, well-defined group of elites. In Oxford, England, with its new plan to trap people near their homes and spy on them wherever they go, we’re seeing the latest phase in the socialist crackdown that Rush [Limbaugh] identified 30 years ago.

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.  Read Ms. Widburg’s column at American Thinker here.

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The Decline of Higher Education

 

The great Victor Davis Hanson goes through all sorts of “woke” reasons that colleges and universities are failing.  The full article (“Are Universities Doomed”) is at The Daily Signal here, but here’s his conclusion:

How ironic that universities are rushing to erode meritocratic standards—history’s answer to the age-old, pre-civilizational bane of tribal, racial, class, elite, and insider prejudices and bias that eventually ensure poverty and ruin for all.

VDH could as well be describing the decline of western civilization itself.

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